Are you an ecommerce retailer who spends most of your marketing efforts tweaking your SEO, UX and HTML? Maybe you should focus less on your acronyms and coding and more on something simple: your product packaging.

That’s right. Attractive, premium packaging is a major factor in whether shoppers buy products online, whether they become loyal customers and whether they share images of their purchases with others on social media, a new study reports.

Half of customers expect online purchases to arrive in premium packaging if that’s what they would find in-store.

52 percent say they are more likely to make repeat purchases from an e-tailer that delivers orders in premium packaging.

Some 40 percent say that if a product arrives in a “unique, branded or gift-like box” they would share an image of it on social media; 83 percent of those would post it on Facebook.

Among 18-to-25-year-olds, these numbers were even higher with almost three-fourths (75 percent) saying they would share the product image on social media.

About 60 percent say it’s important for packaging to be sustainable, and that sustainability also factors into whether they re-use a bag or box from an e-tailer.

Why should you care about your customers re-using your packaging? Well, it’s a great way to spread the word about your business. Almost 90 percent of customers do re-use packaging, and 30 percent of consumers say they’ve discovered a new brand after seeing a customer carrying the retailer’s packaging in public.

How can your small business profit from these findings?

Beat the competition. Even if your business is ecommerce only and has no brick-and-mortar presence, it’s important for your packaging to be comparable to—and preferably, better than—that of your online and brick-and-mortar competition. Shop their stores and sites to see how they deliver and make sure your packaging packs even more of a punch.

Promote your packaging on your website. Including images of packaging can boost the “luxury factor” of the shopping experience, plus whet consumers’ appetites for the arrival of their purchase.

Toot your own horn. If you do use sustainable packaging, make sure you tout that information on your website and in the packages customers receive—for instance, by enclosing a little slip explaining how your packaging is sustainable or a note on the invoice calling attention to it.

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Rieva Lesonsky

Rieva Lesonsky is CEO of GrowBiz Media, a media and custom content company focusing on small business and entrepreneurship. Email Rieva at rieva@smallbizdaily.com, follow her on Google+ and Twitter.com/Rieva, and visit her website, SmallBizDaily.com, to get the scoop on business trends and sign up for Rieva’s free TrendCast reports.

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